Dealing with Day-to-day Differentiation

This week I ran a session on differentiation with our NQTs. I felt it was a good, open session where we could all share some ideas and describe the challenges that we face in meeting the learning needs of all of our students. The fact is that we all find it hard – and that’s because it is; sometimes it can feel as if you’re never quite getting it right because someone or other isn’t flourishing. As with many things in teaching, we need to aim high but we also need to be realistic, pragmatic and tolerant of imperfection in order to flourish ourselves.

To begin with we talked about the myths.

Differentiation does not mean that you must have tiered resources and tasks in every lesson. It does not mean you should have must-should-could learning objectives. It does not mean that a lesson where every student is doing the same task is fundamentally worse